Eye Magazine

There is nothing new about moving type and image. The desire to make graphics move, to see type twist and change within three-dimensional space – or create that illusion – has been around for some time. The optical effects of signpainting, day-glo inks, shadows, embossing and debossing all allow the designer to play with the idea of kineticism, even when there is no actual movement. The need to animate graphics for film, TV, advertising and branding has provided the economic driver; the human desire for novelty, in tandem with all that technology permits, has provided the impetus.

Here in the third decade of the 21st century, motion design is everywhere. The tablets in our hands, like the enormous screens that fill entire billboard sites, are static objects on whose gleaming surfaces we perceive the fantasy of graphic outlines that swell, burst, swivel and change constantly in a 2D simulacrum of 3D space and time. What’s new is the ubiquity and diversity of means to make words and pictures dance; the multiplicity of ways to display the results; and the number of practitioners working in this field. Successive waves of creative activity have become a tsunami …

John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London

Top image: Snippet of Shape Study – Line by Dirk Koy.